Radar & UFO Stories
Radar & UFO Stories
Exotic measurement systems trigger paranoia
Radar emission measurements
The Wild West version of radar work
![Here are some of the better stories that we’ve accrued over the years in the course of radar measurements and fireball research. Surprisingly (or maybe not surprisingly) several of them have involved “UFOs.”
“It could have been me.”
Back in 1973 the Radio Spectrum Measurement System (RSMS) had just been fitted out at the Hewlett Packard (HP) plant in Cupertino, California, near Stanford. The thing was a highly sophisticated electronic intelligence system built for spectrum management applications. It had cost nearly a million dollars. Two guys were in the RSMS, one driving and the other riding as a passenger. Two other guys were riding in a chase car behind the van. They were running about 20 minutes behind the RSMS. The van driver, whom I shall call Larry, had John Smilley riding with him as a passenger. Both guys were electronics engineers in the Radio Spectrum Occupancy Group (RSOG) in the Department of Commerce in Boulder. As the guys made their way down a narrow, winding mountain road from the plant, Larry cut one of the corners a little tight, on the inside of the curve. He had to do this because the road was very narrow at that point, the curve was blind, and the vehicle was long. The ground next to the asphalt on the inside of the curve looked good and solid: new-mown grass on the shoulder was sticking up at the same level as the asphalt.
As the RSMS went into the curve it came to a sudden halt and tilted over onto its right side, at about a 45-degree vertical angle smack against an embankment next to the curve. Since both of the van’s two doors were on the right side and were hence sealed by the weight of the van on the embankment, John and Larry had to break out a back window and crawl out through that opening. They were both shook up but had both been wearing their seat belts and therefore were unhurt. They began to inspect the van to see what had happened and how much damage had been done.
Several things immediately became obvious. First, the grass on the inside of the curve was not growing out of ground that was at the same height as the paved road surface. It was growing out of a hole that was not two inches deep, but was rather two feet deep. Compounding the problem, the grass turned out to have been camouflaging not just a hole but also one end of a concrete culvert that stuck out from underneath the asphalt, inside the hole. As the van had gone around the corner, its rear wheels on the inside of the curve had dropped into the grass-filled hole, had been caught by the projecting end of the culvert, and had been snagged like a boat hitting a submerged tree trunk in a shallow river. The rear axle of the RSMS had been instantly torn from its moorings and now the vehicle was resting on its side against the embankment.
So here was the brand new, million-dollar (in 1973 dollars) RSMS van, lying on its side with its rear axle torn off, not two miles from its point of manufacture. Oh crumbs. The chase car, in which Bob Matheson, the RSMS group leader, was riding would show up at any moment. Larry was distraught. He said to John, “Look at this! It’s ruined! Bob’s gonna be so upset!” To which John replied, “Well, Larry, it could have been worse.”

RSMS-I: The original computer-controlled spectrum measurement system. This photograph was taken when we were in the predecessor organization to NTIA, called the Office of Telecommunications (OT) in the White House. There was originally a small, white HP logo inside the blue stripe at the front end on the left and right sides. It had been put there in recognition of the important role that HP engineers had played in the project, but the lawyers made us remove it.
Nevertheless, the ARS-400 system in the RSMS-I was instrumental (sorry about the pun) to HP’s later development of the famous, breakthrough designs of the HP-8568A and 8566B spectrum analyzers. We were there, ahead of those systems, working with HP.
John Smilley, one of my critical mentors until his retirement in 1990.
“Worse?”, said Larry, “I just rolled a million-dollar van onto its side, two miles from the plant and an hour after we picked it up!” Again John said, “Nevertheless, Larry, really, it could have been worse.”
Larry, now getting even more upset and his voice rising, said, “Worse? Worse? Bob’s gonna fire me! So you just tell me, John, you just tell me how this could have been worse!”
John replied, with his trademark twinkle in his eye, “Well, Larry, I could have been driving it.” Larry’s response was not recorded as part of the official RSMS record.
(Be it known by all, that Bob Matheson was in fact totally sympathetic to Larry when he arrived on the scene; he saw that the problem in the curve was a trap waiting to be sprung. Larry retired years later, after a long and productive career. The replacement of the RSMS rear axle was surprisingly easy.)
“Our presence here has nothing to do with recent UFO sightings”
One time when we were in the midst of getting radar data at Edwards Air Force Base in the southern California desert, we pulled into a gas station just as the sun was setting. Everything looked like a scene in a movie--the lonely, deserted gas station, a tumbleweed blowing across the asphalt, the sun setting. Fueling the van took a long time because it had two fuel tanks and they didn’t burp air very effectively as the gas went in. So as were sitting there watching the cactus grow, we noticed two guys inside the station office who were obviously talking about us, pointing at the Travco through the window. Finally, one of them came out and walked over to us. He started making some small talk, asking about Boulder and so forth. It was obvious that he was dying to see what was inside. So John Smilley said, “well, here, have a look.” John took the padlock off the door. (We had to padlock it because the regular latch was unreliable and we didn’t want the door flying open on the road.) When the guy looked inside he saw all these huge racks filled with exotic-looking electronic equipment: oscilloscopes, computers, analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog converters, frequency synthesizers, detector circuits, electronic screen monitors, you name it. (Honestly, the interior of the old RSMS looked better and more exotic than any of the made-up junk for monitoring van interiors that I’ve ever seen in any movie.)
The guy pulled his head back out of the van and turned to John and asked, “you’re with the Department of Commerce?” And with a totally straight face John answered, “well, I just want to emphasize that our presence here has nothing to do with the recent string of UFO sightings that have occurred in this area.”
The guy’s eyes got big and he looked at John conspiratorially without saying another word. Then he turned around and hurried back to the gas station office. Just as he stepped inside with the door swinging shut behind him we heard him say, “Charlie, I told ya!”
Speaking of UFOs, there was the late-night desert visitation red-light event...
Here’s a UFO-debunking event in which I participated. Back in the 1980s we were using the RSMS to perform a background radio spectrum survey for a future radar cross section (RCS) range that was to be constructed at a remote location in the southern California desert. We were doing the work for a U.S. government agency, but a private company had been contracted to eventually build the range. The facility was to be constructed at the location of an existing but disused airstrip, and so that was where we were using the RSMS. The radio background survey was to run 24 hours a day for two weeks.
The presence of this old airstrip created a problem for our spectrum survey. Precisely because it was serviceable but not officially in use, it was known to have previously been an attractive location for drug-runners who used it to make midnight deliveries from Mexico. The evidence for this activity was left behind in the form of dozens of empty jerry cans that had been used to re-fuel aircraft by hand and then tossed aside prior to the airplanes’ eventual departure back to either Mexico or some legitimate airfield in California. (Fla-Bob airport east of Los Angeles was a hot spot for this sort of activity at that time.) Our sponsors were concerned that some drug runners might come up on the field at night, discover our super-snooper van sitting there and running with a million dollars’ worth of exotic electronic intelligence equipment inside, and then shoot whoever they might find operating said equipment.
In fact, we stayed away from the place at night, but still they wanted to have the site protected by an armed presence. So they provided security guards for the facility. There was always a single guard on duty at all times, with shift rotations throughout every 24-hour period. The single guard would never have been able to fight off a heavily armed contingent of drug runners, but I think the idea was to have the drug runners’ confederates spot the guard’s presence in advance and then wave off any aircraft by radio or telephone before they might land. In other words, the guard was supposed to be a deterrent.
Now, here’s the hook: The RCS work was connected with a new and exotic technology, that of radar-evading stealth features for aircraft, that was just then being developed by the U.S. government and this company. So the spectrum survey was shrouded in mystery, especially to the guards themselves. They were told that they were protecting something very top-secret, and not to ask any further questions about what was going on with this exotic-looking radio measurement vehicle. As a result, the guards were primed for something weird to happen out there in the desert. To make matters even more psychologically suspenseful for the guards, we only worked at the RSMS during the day. All of the night-time data collection was performed by our automated, computer-controlled measurement system. So at night the single guard was left to sit there, alone, in the middle of the big, dark, empty desert with this unmanned and allegedly top-secret, whats-it van running next door to their shack.
One morning when we arrived at the RSMS we saw this huge contingent of field agents clustered around the guard shack. They were questioning the woman who had been on duty the previous night, and she was obviously shaken-up about something. It turns out that she had been sitting there in absolute, pitch darkness under an overcast sky (remember that for later) when she had seen a red light faintly in the distance. Shortly thereafter, the light had come right up to her and had illuminated the entire interior of the guard shack. The light then flew away, and then returned again. It kept coming back at her over and over, pulsating, shining all over her body and the shack as if it were physically examining her. It had apparently come from something that had hovered in the air near the shack. After this hovering, pulsating red light had repeatedly probed her for an indeterminate period of time (she was too distraught to be able recollect how long this had gone on), it had abruptly ceased its activity. She had called for back-up, but by the time anyone could drive all the way out to this remote spot in the desert the mysterious, hovering, light-emitting thing was long gone. Clearly, this incident was the work of aliens who had gone considerably up-scale from their ordinary use of kidnapping and anal-probing techniques. At least that’s what the guard seemed to think.
The agents were all upset, too, but for a different reason. They were immediately caught up in the idea that a sensitive project was connected with this site. They thought that maybe some foreign power was somehow examining this allegedly super-secret site, maybe from a satellite in space with some sort of probe beam. Or something. Leave it to security people to start jumping to conclusions. So they all took off to start chasing the Russians.
In contrast, I and my co-engineer, John Smilley, thought that perhaps this incident might have been rooted in some odd physical event. If so, then it might recur, or we might at least develop a clue to what was going on by just sitting still and watching the area for a while. We wanted to test our hypothesis that something innocent but subtle might be happening. So we decided that we ought to stay at the RSMS van the next night and just watch the desert for a while. And that’s what we did. We ran a stake-out the next night with a pair of 7x50 binoculars. Not long after the sun had set, we started to scan around the horizon with the binoculars.
Within a few minutes we saw through our binoculars, on a distant peak, a flashing red light. It was faint even in the binoculars and was not really visible to the naked eye unless one used averted vision (looking through the side of the eye, where the more light-sensitive rods are concentrated). It only came on for a fraction of a second every ten seconds or so. Based on the fact that it would gradually brighten and then darken every time we saw it, we inferred that it was a rotating beacon rather than a strobe light. We noted the direction of the light from our location, checked an aeronautical chart that we had in the van, and saw that the light was coming from the direction of a feature called Haystack Mountain, at a U.S. Air Force airfield many miles away. We guessed that the beacon was on some sort of tower at the summit of Haystack. But if this was the source of the mystery light, then why was it so dim now compared to what the guard had seen the night before?
The next morning we called the airfield manager at the Air Force facility and asked whether there was a beacon light on Haystack, etc. He said, “Oh, yes, it’s a red rotating beacon.” So, we asked, did they ever crank up the power for the light at night? “Oh, yes, sometimes. Ordinarily it runs at 500 watts, but if it gets foggy or overcast we turn it up to 10 kilowatts [10,000 watts].” OK, thanks, we said.
So that’s what had happened. Remember that on the night when the guard had been spooked, it had been overcast. The light had therefore been cranked up to full power, and the rest was history. To the guard in the pitch-blackness (and dare I say, for her, the creepiness) of the desert night, that light had been so bright that it had seemed to be coming from something that was right next to her. And the fact was that it had totally illuminated the inside of her shack, as John and I subsequently determined on an overcast night when they turned up the light power again. As with all UFO reports, a very innocent phenomenon had been mistaken for an extraterrestrial visit. But I have to admit that it was fun to sort it all out, and we were at least able to report our finding to the security field agents, who presumably called off their chase for Russian agents.
This story of a bright light being thought by an eyewitness to be very close at night is a very common theme. People commonly and mistakenly believe that fireballs are only a mile away (or less) from them, when subsequent investigation may show that the fireballs were actually a hundred miles away. Many UFO reports are connected to this mistaken connection between the brightness and the closeness of a light at night.
And while I’m at it, here’s one more of my UFO-debunking exploits...
This UFO story doesn’t involve the RSMS, but it’s so good that I have to include it here. As with the previous story, this is my first-hand account of a UFO report and how I investigated it. The story begins in the late 1990s when I was researching fireballs with the Curator or Geology at the Denver Museum of Natural History (now the Denver Museum of Nature and Science). We were encouraging members of the public to report fireballs to us, so that we could interview them at field locations and use triangulation to identify the true locations and flight paths of the fireballs. Our ultimate goal was to recover meteorites from fireballs, as indeed we eventually did on one occasion. (See the related “Meteorite Recovery” page on this site.)
So one day we received a call from a person in southern Colorado, near Alamosa in the San Luis Valley. He wanted to tell us about a UFO that he had seen, and in fact had videotaped. The videotape had earlier been broadcast as part of a UFO segment on a syndicated night-time pseudo-news program, one of the sort that runs 12-minute human-interest and mystery segments on weird and mysterious phenomena. We asked him to describe what he had seen, and then asked him to send us a copy of his videotape.
The television program segment, which I eventually reviewed by the way, was pure hype. It showed a few seconds of grainy, shaky handy-cam footage of a bright point of light in the sky. The narrator said that the hovering event had lasted for something like an hour before the mysterious object “disappeared instantly”. The narrator said this thing had generated UFO reports over a wide area of Colorado (which it had), and that NORAD and FAA radars had shown no objects hovering in the sky above the San Luis Valley (which I could never independently verify, but as events would show could have been quite true). The television producers got the usual out-of-it-looking, stone-faced government press-office representative to go on-camera and say that there was nothing the government could say about the event. You know, the usual UFO story, ending with the inevitable stock punch line for these things: “What was that mysterious object? Could it have come from another planet? Perhaps we’ll never know.”
Well, I figured out what it was. Read on and I’ll tell you the secret...
Our correspondent was eager for us to validate his sighting. He promptly mailed us a copy of his VHS-format videotape. VHS is a bad format for making copies, but the tape we received was passably viewable. It was shot with a hand-held video camcorder using fairly high-grade consumer electronics circa 1995. The tape was taken in broad daylight from a location where a partially-constructed house was visible when the framing was wide-angle. In the tape footage the sky is clear, blue and cloudless, typical of Colorado. The camera angle is initially wide enough to show the partially-built house in the background. There is a bright, glinting point of light in the sky above the house. Eventually the camera angle tightens onto the spot. Because the camera is hand-held without any motion-compensation feature, and probably also because the camera-man (who is the guy who called us with the report and who was interviewed on the “news” program) was excited at the time, the footage is probably a bit more unsteady than the usual shaky-cam shots that most people take. Still, it is viewable and becomes steadier as it runs.
The cameraman gradually zooms in on the bright point in the sky. As the field of view tightens, the point itself becomes quite fuzzy. The problem is that the camera apparently is being operated in an auto-focus mode. My evidence for this is that the bright point of light actually comes into sharp focus two or three times, at intervals of about 15 seconds. This is the typical behavior of an auto-focus mechanism that is “hunting” for a point of sharp focus, but that can’t find any high-contrast lines in the field of view on which to operate. The result is that it just keeps hunting from infinity to its closest distance and then back out to infinity, ad infinitum. At one of those rare moments of sharp focus at infinity, I saw exactly what the object in question was.
Here’s what I saw at those intermittent moments of sharp focus at infinity: The UFO became more than a point of light. It became instead a small but well-defined, oblong (fairly elliptical) shape, looking a bit like a silver pumpkin or a short, fat cigar. Its long axis was parallel to the horizon. Running vertically on the surface of this thing, like the gore-lines on the surface of a globe, were relatively thin dark lines, as delicate as a spider-web seen at a distance. It was obvious that this thing was a high-altitude balloon, the kind that is used for weather research, astronomical observations and space probe testing (such as for Mars vehicles that are supposed to fly in that planet’s atmosphere and for which the balloon altitude can simulate some Martian atmospheric conditions).
Yes, I know, the joke is that the U.S. government always debunks UFO sightings as either swamp gas or weather balloons, and I really am a government scientist, and I am calling this a high-altitude balloon, used either for weather or research work. But folks, that’s exactly what the tape shows. Those vertical lines that look like gore-lines on a globe are in fact the balloon’s envelope gore seams. The balloon’s shape is transversely oblong because it has reached a high altitude. The balloon disappeared suddenly as seen by the people on the ground because, at the end of a typical flight, they send a radio command to rip the balloon envelope. The payload drops away from the torn envelope, rapidly free-falls to a lower altitude (my guesstimate is 10,000 feet above ground level), and then deploys its own parachute for final recovery. But to an observer on the ground the thing they are watching (which is the reflective balloon envelope) seems to simply vanish into thin air.
The balloon would probably not have shown up on FAA-NORAD air-search radars (operated jointly at continental U.S. locations) because it would have been flying at an altitude of perhaps 100,000 feet, where these radars have little or no coverage. A long-range L-band radar (around 1300 MHz) will see objects at about 65,000 to 85,000 feet altitude at an extreme range of about 150 to 200 nautical miles, give or take. At closer distances radars do not see objects that are even that high. Radar beams always have maximum elevation angles, so the closer to a radar the coverage is, the lower the maximum altitude of the coverage will be. Therefore high-altitude balloons will often not appear on radar scope displays. Dedicated NORAD radars would have not seen it because, other than the joint-site FAA-NORAD air search radars mentioned already, NORAD radars are used solely for space-search, space-track and long-range missile early warning functions from locations on the U.S. east and west coasts, Alaska, Greenland and Scotland. They are not looking for (or at) objects at 100,000 feet altitude at distances of tens of miles or even a couple of hundred miles. And from their locations (as listed above) they certainly aren’t looking through the skies of southern Colorado.
My best guess as to the balloon’s origination point, never verified I will admit, would be either Holloman Air Force Base (HAFB) or the adjacent White Sands Missile Range (WSMR) in New Mexico. They fly a lot of these balloons from those locations every year. Other origins, such as from a university research location or even an amateur radio group, are possible. Some amateur radio people (HAMs) do fly these things, sometimes independently and sometimes in conjunction with university or government research groups.
I was excited to have worked out the UFO’s true identity, and I thought my correspondent who had shot the video would be excited as well. I couldn’t find his phone number, nor did I want to pay for a potentially lengthy long-distance phone call to him, so I reported my findings to him via e-mail. I was a bit naive and was not prepared for the response that I received.
Far from being happy to be told what it was, he was upset. He said that this UFO had changed his life for the better at a point where he had been under a lot of stress. He had no interest in hearing my explanation for what he had seen. I had punctured his bubble. I had been a total kill-joy. I was closed-minded. And so on. Far from being open-minded himself about what the phenomenon might have been, he had totally made up his mind in advance that it was an extraterrestrial spacecraft. He would hear none of my alternative explanation for what it could be--and certainly was. He refused to respond to my entreaties to examine those critical sharp-focus frames of the videotape for himself. Never mind that I had analyzed the event thoroughly, using his videotape, at his request. I had done my review with an open mind, albeit one that would have been surprised to discover that an extraterrestrial spacecraft had flown halfway across the galaxy just to hover in the sky above the hauntingly beautiful but nevertheless nearly empty landscape of the San Luis Valley in southern Colorado. But when I saw that image of a balloon on the individual sharp-focus frames of the tape, I knew the jig was up. My conclusion was forced upon me by my own observation.
He, the UFO enthusiast, in contrast, was the one who was determined to take everything on faith and investigate nothing. He refused to seriously scrutinize his own videotape, his prized evidence. I even offered to interview two or three eyewitnesses with him, triangulate their sightings, and arrive at a likely point in the sky (and specifically an altitude) for the object, so as to further test my hypothesis that it had been a balloon flying at something around 100,000 feet. But my correspondent would have none of it. We stopped communicating. Ah, well, it was a fun exercise, anyway.
Postscript: Skyhook Balloons as UFO Generators
Of course this wasn’t the first time that people had seen something glinting in the sky, seeming to hover and then move laterally, and not realized that it was a high-altitude balloon. There is a famous case in which someone lost their life because of such a misapprehension. On 7 January 1948 four U.S. Air Force F-51 Mustang pursuit aircraft (late versions of the famous P-51 design of WW II) raced through the skies of Kentucky in pursuit of a highly reflective, unidentified object that was seen by ground-based observers to be moving across the sky.
Why was the Air Force so excited about mysterious objects floating through American skies? Well, unbeknownst to the general public at that time, and mostly unbeknownst even nowadays, the U.S. government was itself probing into Soviet airspace with secret overflights at that time. The reason was that the Strategic Air Command (SAC) was planning for what they believed would be an inevitable war with the Soviet Union and they were scoping out Soviet air defenses and radar locations in preparation for that apparently-imminent war. Sometimes the US overflights skirted the edges of Soviet territory, originating in places such as Turkey and Japan. Other times they intruded inside the airspace of the USSR. Early on, electronic-surveillance EC-130s and photographically equipped RB-57s were used. Later, as losses of those aircraft mounted, US engineers developed the U-2, the SR-71 and ultimately sophisticated satellite systems for fulfillment of these missions. (Although it should be caveated that reconnaissance aircraft still function in roles that satellites cannot completely fulfill.) Many of the early overflights using the lumbering EC-130s and RB-57s were shot down. It was a very bloody and completely secret war, and the guys who lost their lives on these electronic and photographic surveillance missions were never properly acknowledged for the risks that they took and the sacrifices, including in many cases their lives, that were made. Only one, Francis Gary Powers, was ever really acknowledged, and that acknowledgment was forced by the Russians. When President Eisenhower was first informed that he was overdue and then missing on his Pakistan-to-Norway flight over the USSR, the White House advisors told the President that he shouldn’t worry about it because the Soviets never said anything about their shoot-downs of U.S. aircraft, and the pilots and crews pretty much never survived those incidents anyway. (Which was itself somewhat of a lie; some aircrew members were captured and died in Soviet captivity during the Cold War, again never acknowledged by either the US or USSR governments.) Kruschev shocked Eisenhower when he announced days later that a U-2 had been shot down. Kruschev waited for the pro-forma denial of spying activities by the US government, and then announced that, by the way, the pilot was alive, too. Ah, well.
But I digress. Given the impressively large US overflight program’s ongoing series of missions near and inside Soviet airspace, the US Air Force was concerned that the Soviet Union might start sending its own reconnaissance aircraft over U.S. territory, again in preparation for a presumed-imminent war. To try to counter that eventuality, government officials had recently begun to tell military people and civilians alike to be especially vigilant regarding flying objects that could not be identified. Thus was the pump primed--this was the genesis of the Cold War UFO craze.
The four Mustangs had diverted from a routine ferry mission at the request of a local Air Force control tower. One of the planes was low on fuel when the chase began and soon broke away to land. Two more of the aircraft eventually broke off the chase because they were approaching 22,000 feet altitude and were flying without supplemental oxygen.
The inexperienced flight leader, Capt. Thomas Mantell, in contrast kept up the pursuit, heedless of the danger of flying higher without supplemental oxygen. He seems to have thought that he was closing in on his quarry. He was suffering from target fixation, in which a pilot becomes obsessed by one problem to the exclusion of all others. Plus, he may have been losing judgment due to incipient hypoxia.
Despite his belief that he was closing in on the mysterious object, as he climbed higher and higher the target seemed as far away as ever. This is what happens when you see a point of light in the sky--you think you have an idea of how far away it is, when in reality you cannot possibly have any idea what its distance might be. Mantell had become obsessed by the idea that the thing was close to him and flying just a little higher than his own altitude. Its vertical slant angle (the vertical angle at which he saw it to be above him) was apparently rather shallow, leading him to think that the thing was only a few miles away and was flying just slightly higher than he was. That was an illusion, a fatal illusion. In reality, at that shallow vertical slant angle his target could have just as easily been (and in fact was) fifty or a hundred miles away from him at a whopping 100,000 feet altitude. So as he chased it, still climbing in his Mustang, and it didn’t get any bigger or apparently any closer to him, he thought it must be moving away from him at high speed. In reality, it was a long way away from him and was at an altitude many times higher than his own. He had become the victim of an optical illusion, one that would shortly cost him his life.
Mantell became so focused on the bright object that he was chasing that he forgot about his own altitude limitation--he was flying without supplemental oxygen. He climbed so high that he passed out from hypoxia, perhaps at about 25,000 feet. His plane continued upward on its own to about 30,000 feet. With Mantell unconscious in the cockpit, the plane eventually descended spontaneously and finally crashed.
Capt. Mantell seems to have died tragically and needlessly. Far from being a threat to U.S. national security, the object that he had been chasing was one of the then-secret Project Skyhook (WS-119L) balloons which, ironically, were being developed as platforms for carrying aerial cameras and other equipment over Soviet territory as substitutes for the ill-fated EC-130s and RB-57s, the U-2 still being years away from development. It is not a coincidence that Skyhook balloons began flying in 1947, the same year that UFO reports began to flood the media. Skyhook balloons were ideal UFO-report generators. (The Skyhook program never really worked out, by the way, because the balloons, being unguided, mainly just snapped pictures of clouds, empty taiga, tundra, and steppe-lands.)
Now comes the clincher: Several Skyhook balloons had been launched earlier that day, 7 January 1948, from Clinton County, Ohio, about 150 miles from the place where the F-51 aircraft later engaged in their chase. It was almost certainly one of those balloons that Mantell chased to his death.
Over the years, Skyhook balloons generated additional UFO reports due to an unusual flight profile characteristic. Not only were they mistaken for alien spacecraft when they were floating along at high altitudes, but they were also observed when they were sometimes commanded to perform controlled descents to nearly ground level (by carefully venting gas out of their envelopes). They would be brought to a near-hover condition near the ground, at which point they would drop their payloads. Relieved of the payload weight, the untethered balloon envelopes would then ascend rapidly into the sky and vanish in a few seconds. To make it even better for UFO enthusiasts, these things had flashing red lights, used by recovery crews to help find the payloads at night. Sound familiar? A UFO with red flashing lights slowly descends vertically to near the ground, hovers for a few moments, then disgorges a “small ship” as the “mother ship” suddenly races straight up at “incredible speed” without making any noise. That’s a UFO!
“If you come back and we’re not here, Boston might be in trouble”
In the summer of 1979 we were using the RSMS to perform some hit-and-run measurements in the Boston area. This was the time when the Skylab laboratory’s orbit was rapidly decaying at it was expected to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere at any moment. Passers-by who saw our Travco motor-home with the exotic-looking antenna array assumed that we were tracking Skylab. Over and over, I was asked whether Skylab was going to hit Boston. I eventually got tired of explaining that we were doing other work; instead I would always just say, “Well, I’m not sure if Boston’s in trouble. But if you come back here in a few hours and you see that we’re gone, Look Out!” Since we weren’t staying in any one place for more than about 90 minutes at a time on this particular effort, any of the people who bothered to check my statement inevitably discovered that we were always gone when they returned. Hopefully they all concluded that they were about to be killed by space junk. (Pieces of Skylab landed in the Australian outback on July 11, 1979, with no loss of human life but some damage to a few unfortunate weeds.)
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